Friday, December 04, 2009

The Tiger Woods Index

Is the public more interested in Tiger Woods than Climategate? And does the media coverage reflect the public interest? Those were the questions posed yesterday by Jan Corn in an obscure publication called Associated Content.

Corn had her own ideas, using Twitter searches as a measure, suggesting that Tiger Woods is grabbing the lion's share of attention while issues like Climategate get a far smaller amount of interest – from the media at least.

Twitter may or may not be the best measure but, over the last two weeks, the measure most constantly referred to is the number of general web pages on Google compared with the number of news reports recorded.

This provides a measure in respect of one subject, but allows no comparison with other issues. Thus, as an experiment, I started trawling around, taking the stats on other issues in the news. To make the figures comparable, I then worked out the ratios of web pages to news pages reported.

On that basis, Tiger Woods delivered 22,500,000 web and 46,025 news pages, giving ratio of 489. That is the "Tiger Woods Index" (TWI) against which I chose to measure a raft of other issues.

"Climategate" was the next obvious choice and that produced 28,400,000 on the web page search, compared with 2,930 news items, delivering a ratio of 9,693. Using the TWI as a comparator, the public in general are more interested in "Climategate" than Tiger Woods, by a factor of nearly 20 times.

Applying the "ratio analysis" (doesn't that sound grand!) to ten current issues, including the two already mentioned, an arbitrary list emerged, ranked by importance to the general public, against media interest. This is as follows:

Assessing this ranking, we see that the media is vastly more interested in the Iraq Inquiry – known as the Chilcot Inquiry – than is the general public. This rather fits with our own perception, that the inquiry is largely a media obsession.

By this measure, David Cameron gets far more attention than is warranted by the public interest, as indeed does Gordon Brown. That would accord with a general view that the media is far more interested in politicians than is the public at large.

President Obama, by contrast, is under-represented in the British print media (online), as is Afghanistan. But way out front in the annals of media neglect, romping home in first place with a clear lead is "Climategate".

Just for fun, I did another thirty issues, and ranked them. They are not random choices – the human animal is not capable of random actions. Nor are they scientifically selected, and they are most certainly not peer-reviewed. They have not even been "adjusted" or subject to "smoothing". For what it is worth, the list is here:

Interestingly, the topic "newspapers" is closest to the Tiger Woods Index, by which measure Sarkozy is vastly over-reported. The Royal Mail, Iain Dale and EU Referendum are most neglected, far more so than even "Climategate", compared with their greater online presence. I am sure Dale will agree. Relatively, he gets even less profile than "socks" - which themselves have twice the relative media profile of "Climategate".

There is probably a more scientific way of picking the topics, and any qualified statistician would probably shoot my TWI to pieces. Make of it what you will. But at least, unlike Michael Mann, I can claim to have shown my working out.